The power and flexibility of personal computers has seen a tremendous growth in their use in all areas of our society, including applications where the data is sensitive in nature. Traditionally, these applications have been found within agencies of the federal government, but the highly competitive marketplace has made such information as marketing, financial, and business plans equally as sensitive to companies who compete against each other in the commercial sector as well.
In the early years of the industry when computers were large mainframes, it was relatively easy to control access to them simply by controlling physical access to the room they were contained in. Since modern personal computers are much smaller and may in fact be designed to be carried with a user, it is much more difficult to prevent unauthorized access while still maintaining the advantage of portability.
While it is possible through a software program running on the computer to require a user to enter a password or other verification code, this method is not robust in that a password may be guessed, or the software program may be bypassed by commercially available software development tools. Other security methods involving various hardware devices or keys have been proposed and implemented, but they too suffer from the disadvantage that a sufficiently knowledgeable and persistent user may gain unauthorized access to data by tapping into the computer's operating system with specially designed software programs. For applications with particularly sensitive data, it may also be desirable to provide a way to physically and logically destroy the data before it becomes compromised.
Therefore, there is a need to have a convenient way to prevent the unauthorized use of a computer system which is not subject to bypass while still maintaining the portability and flexibility of the computer system. There is an additional need to provide a way to authorize users to use the computer system. There is a further need to physically and logically destroy data in response to unauthorized attempts by a user to violate the physical or logical integrity of the computer system.